The colour of lettersROEN

Interactive test · five minutes

What colour is the letter A?

For some people letters have colours: A is red, B is blue, always the same, for as long as they can remember. This form of synaesthesia, in which letters have colours, turns up in roughly one or two people in a hundred. Give each letter the colour that seems to be its own. Every letter comes up three times, in a shuffled order; at the end you see how consistent you were and how your alphabet looks next to the 6,588 people with synaesthesia in an American study.

A

Tap the colour that feels like the letter's. Do not think too long: the first impression counts. If a letter has no colour for you, press "No colour".

The colours you pick stay in this tab. The page sends nothing anywhere.

Your alphabet

Your alphabet appears here once every letter has its colours.

What it means to see letters in colour

For people with grapheme–colour synaesthesia, each letter has a particular colour, which they see or simply "know", and which stays the same for years. The test here checks one thing: whether you give the same letter the same colour three times without knowing when it will come.

The test here uses the consistency measure of the Synesthesia Battery by David Eagleman and colleagues, published in 2007 and run ever since at synesthete.org. The score is the distance between the three colours picked for the same letter, averaged over the letters. Picks made completely at random give about 3. The Battery counts a score under 1 as "as consistent as a synaesthete"; a 2013 study proposed a cutoff of 1.43. All 6,588 people in the data passed the cutoff of 1, with a median score of 0.68.

The alphabet of the 6,588

Each row below is a letter, and each stripe is the colour one of the 6,588 gave it, arranged by colour family. For some letters one colour clearly leads: A is red for 53% of them, Y yellow for 44%, B blue for 40%. O and I are most often white, X and Z most often black. Others, such as J, K or U, have no clear favourite.

For each letter, 240 colours taken at equal steps from all the answers for that letter, sorted by colour family. Letters with no colour are left out.

The fridge magnets

In 2015 Nathan Witthoft, Jonathan Winawer and David Eagleman searched these alphabets for the traces of a toy: a set of Fisher-Price magnetic letters, made in the United States from 1971 to 1990, in which the colours repeated in the order red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple:

For 400 of the 6,588, at least 10 of the 26 letters are in the same colour family as in the set. If each person shuffled their own colours among the letters, that would happen less than once in a thousand. Of these 400, the 388 with a known year of birth were all born in 1967 or later, so they could have had the toy as children. Among those born from 1975 to 1979, 15% have the magnets' alphabet.

How many of the synaesthetes in the data have their letters in the magnets' colours, by year of birth0%5%10%15%20%years the toy was made, 1971–1990194019451950195519601965197019751980198519901995
How many of the synaesthetes in the data have their letters in the magnets' colours, by year of birth. Share with at least 10 letters in the set's colours, in five-year groups by year of birth; only groups with at least 25 people.

The authors draw a careful conclusion: in some people with synaesthesia, the colours were taken from whatever was around them when they learned their letters. The calculation here, rebuilt from their data and code, gives the same numbers: 400 people, and 329 of the 3,618 born in the years the toy was made.

What the page cannot tell

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